


Animal Brides (Or, Folktales of Aarne-Thompson Type 402)

by Balder12



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fairy Tales, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-22
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 06:11:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/770902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean loves Lisa as a symbol of everything he never had.  Lisa returns the favor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Animal Brides (Or, Folktales of Aarne-Thompson Type 402)

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The Aarne-Thompson types are an attempt to group global folktales numerically by theme.  
> 2. _The shy Selkies are marine creatures in the shape of a seal. They can be found near the islands of Orkney and Shetland. A female can shed her skin and come ashore as a beautiful woman. When a man finds the skin, he can force the Selkie to be a good, if somewhat sad, wife. Should she ever recover the skin, she will immediately return to sea, leaving her husband behind._ \--Encyclopedia Mythica  
>  3\. This fills the Dean/Lisa square on my [SPN Pairing Bingo](http://spnpairingbingo.livejournal.com) card. Bingo achieved!

No one ever asks the selkie whether she misses the sea: if four walls feel small after vast plains of water, if pottage tastes bland after fish blood and raw flesh, if petticoats are heavy after fur.  That’s not how fairy tales work.

Lisa doesn’t have to ask.  The first time she reads about the seal women of Orkney in _Folktales of the World_ she knows she’s one of them.  She’s seven.  When her father overturns the kitchen table, when her mother screams, when the red and blue of the police lights flash through her bedroom, she goes looking for her seal skin.  One day she’ll find it, and when she does she’ll put it on and swim away forever.  It never happens, of course.  Eventually she forgets to look.

Lisa’s still landlocked at 30, an Indiana office manager who’s never seen the ocean.  It’s just as well.  Her son, her job, her family, and her underwater mortgage are all stones tied around her neck.  If she tried to swim with them she’d drown. 

The day Ben returns from certain death she feels the crackle of magic in the folds of Dean’s jacket, the electric thrill of danger and beauty that she’s been denied all her life.  She falls in love instantly and  perfectly, the way girls do in stories.  She asks him to stay, but he slips back into the glossy seal-black of his precious car and disappears.       

Years later he returns to her doorstep to speak in riddles and threaten destruction.  She asks him to stay a second time, but again the Impala carries him away.

The third time she buys him a truck.  In the evenings when Dean’s late getting home she sits on the steps of the garage with a half empty bottle of red wine and stares at the Impala where it’s hidden under its shroud.  She feels a superstitious terror, as if merely lifting the corner of the tarp to take a look would unleash its power.  It’s a dangerous object, but essential.  As the right highway exit approaches Dean will hear the roar of the road like waves calling him on to freedom, and he’ll long to keep driving until everything familiar is behind him.  Lisa’s heard that call a thousand times.  One day Dean might answer it in spite of her and Ben, and the secret promises he hints at but won’t speak of.  He’d never leave the Impala, though.  He’ll always return to her as long as it’s here.  

She tries to please him.  She thinks that sometimes she succeeds.  She’d barely bothered with the holidays once Ben was too old for Santa—their traditional Thanksgiving dinner was Peking duck from the Chinese place downtown—but Dean looks at her with hungry, hopeful eyes when the weather turns cold and so she does the best she can.  She brings home an autumn wreath from Target and gets a turkey recipe from the Food Network.  She decorates her first Christmas tree with ornaments from the Christmas shop that popped up in the husk of a Borders.  It hurts, reliving those memories from her childhood, but Dean’s smile is worth it.  He’s her miracle, exotic and impossible, and she’ll be anything he needs her to be in return.  During the day she’s lover and mother, carefully balanced, a pure-hearted angel who tends the hearth.  At night she chases the taste of salt water and blood across his skin.  She’s never been happier in her life.

Sam returns on cue.  She should have known he would.  These tales only end one way.  When Dean uncovers the Impala he glows with the simple joy of a man going home.  He says he’ll come back from time to time, when the tide washes him ashore, but not to stay.  She longs to join him.  Not now, perhaps, but Ben won’t be a child forever, and when he’s left her there’ll be time at last to run and fight and bleed.  Time to hunt down the unspeakable wonders that life has hidden away.  She doesn’t ask.  She already knows the answer.  Dean loves her like a selkie loves land: she’s the fixed point he visits and leaves behind.

When Lisa’s friends demand to know why she’s not angry that Dean left her, she can only shake her head.  She’s never believed in God, but she believes in the ironclad law of fairy tales.  When Dean pulled the tarp off the Impala he found his skin, fair and square, and he was free to go.  She doesn’t have it in her heart to begrudge him that.  Not when she still hopes that one day she’ll find her own.         

 


End file.
